Use a passphrase as your Norton Core network password

The password that you create for your secure wireless network plays an important role in securing your wireless network. A weak password affects your security score and makes it easy for an intruder to access your network. Your network password must be unique and non-guessable.

Contains at least one special character (!$%^&*()_+|~-=\'{}[]:";'<>?,/@#.)

Going by the above guidelines, a password with 8 characters would have trillions of combinations of alpha, numeric, and special characters. This makes the recommended password guidelines good to set a strong password.

Remembering a complex password is one hard task for us humans. Sometimes, we end up writing down the password somewhere that is prone to theft. But usually, we choose simple combinations that we can easily remember or relate to. And this makes it easy for hacking tools and algorithms to predict and crack the password.

For example, a password like P@ssW0rd123! may look strong given that it follows the above password guidelines. Most people tend to use the same technique when crafting their passwords. The above sample password results in strings of characters and numbers that hackers can easily predict. They can use algorithms that specifically target those weaknesses. And hackers have specific dictionaries for most used passwords. While this password may look secure, it is unsafe. Instead of a password, you can use a passphrase.

A passphrase is a sequence of words that is similar to a password in usage, but is generally longer for added security.

Passphrases are stronger and much longer than passwords. The length of the passphrase makes brute force attacks entirely impractical. A well-chosen passphrase cannot be found in any phrase or quote dictionary making dictionary attacks almost impossible. A passphrase makes it easy for humans to remember and difficult for the hacking algorithms to crack.

You can structure the passphrase to be more easily memorable. For example, a passphrase like 'smith sauce market blind' is not a complex password that you would need to write down somewhere. Hacking algorithms would take centuries to crack this sample passphrase.

Ensure that your passphrase:

has a minimum of 20 characters

has less guessable words but easy for you to remember

is not from a famous quotation from literature, holy books or movies

is hard to guess by intuition, even by someone who knows you well

is not used in other websites or apps

does not follow the same pattern as previous password

does not have consecutive words from the same word group or list

has a high password strength rating score

If you are good at remembering your passwords, you may also use special characters to make the passphrase complex. If you choose to add a special character the passphrase, it must contain one of these: (!$%^&*()_+|~-=\'{}[]:";'<>?,/@#.)

As you type your new password, Norton Core displays a password strength rating to let you know how tough it is to crack the current password. Password strength is a measure of how uncrackable a password is by considering the length and complexity of the password.

Norton Core uses the zxcvbn password strength estimator to calculate the strength of your passphrase. Measuring the password strength protects the password from brute-force attacks and makes it impossible for password hackers to guess and crack the password.